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Comment by forensic | Hacker News Reader

The most efficient use of excess males is war.

The most efficient solution to an excess of geriatrics is euthanasia. (Baby boomers should be worried about this.)

These are bitter pills to swallow.

Chinese social planners are not fools. They know very well that it is better for their excess males to die in battle (and win boons for the country) than for those males to be cooped up in the interior where they will inevitably cause strife.

Even with the most massive pacification campaign in history, that glut of childless-males is guaranteed to cause massive social unrest.

If anything could conquer Asia and India, it would be a gigantic excess of childless males in an authoritarian society. Alexander the Great would have never dreamed of such a perfect country to conquer with.

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Your view on using excess males for war has some historical support. However, I do not feel most of China's leaders hold this view. China is working very hard at modernization. There are more than enough work projects to keep the excess males busy. China's leadership has shown over and over for the last 20 years that it values internal and external investment rather than military use. Sending extra males to Africa and Australia to build mining systems is far more likely (and something actually happening) than using them to die in battle.

The glut of China's males is not a particularly new problem as selective breeding for males is a deep part of their culture.

To be sure, a series of missteps could place China in a position to use its military. However, the surplus males would be used in this case simply as a resource available and not as part of some master plan.

I agree with you that that is what China's leadership wants.

But it's almost impossible to estimate the kind of pressure that will be put on those leaders, when these 30million+ poor males start realizing they are not going to reproduce.

On top of not having the ability to reproduce, these 30million+ poor males are going to be shouldered with the responsibility of spending their money to support their parents.

It's a psychological crunch if there ever was one. A psychological crunch of epic proportions.

I predict the Chinese authorities already have pacification plans in place. Probably a combination of wide-scale drugging and relentless propaganda emphasizing pacifism, loyalty, and duty to the state. The Chinese authorities will need to find a scapegoat that isn't themselves, and it will probably be some combination of every other country. :)

If the Chinese authorities point the aggression of these poor males in the direction of other countries, you have a recipe for war even if the war is just an Orwellian war-for-show.

I would recommend slavery as an option to relieve the pressure, but typically even slaves are allowed to have children and then the children are used as collateral to keep the men in line when they would otherwise revolt.

Beyond mass-scale drugging and propaganda of unimaginable magnitude I don't see how this can't end violently - whether the violence occurs within China or is exported to some dumping ground like Africa.

There are more than enough work projects to keep the excess males busy.

Motivated by what, tho'? Don't underestimate biological imperatives. How much money is enough to pay a hundred million men that there simply aren't women for?

Men compete for women (that is one reason their economy is booming).

> How much money is enough to pay a hundred million men that there simply aren't women for?

There are millions of Chinese living overseas (esp. in Africa). They will change local demographics.

As others have said, no sane country will permit China to outsource this problem to it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio The global average is ~1.06 males per female. With China's population of 1.3 billion people that works out to ~25 million extra men. But the global 65+ ratio is 0.79 males/female.

So a basic solution to gender imbalance has traditionally been older men married to younger woman. With death culling enough young men to fix the problem. When that is not enough, the widow population can fill in for an even larger shortage. China's gender imbalance might seem huge, but individual city's have often faced similar problems so it’s not hard to find past examples of the situation.

The percentages matter, but the numbers matter too. Taiwan had nearly a 10 percent surplus of men when Chiang Kai-shek's defeated armies settled there in 1949. Women who were young in the 1950s in Taiwan (I have spoken to many of these about that era) remember fondly that they could be very choosy about whom they married. Many men in that era never did marry. (Taiwan has had tolerated prostitution throughout the postwar period, which presumably is how the unmatched men dealt with being unmatched.) Today, Taiwan is a HUGE destination for young women from poorer countries (there are a lot of poorer countries than Taiwan, notably Vietnam) who are brought in as "mail-order brides" for older men. But for China to do the same, the Communist Party would have to explicitly give up the claim that it eliminated prostitution after "Liberation" in 1949, and the number of women needed to move into China--from countries that themselves often have shortages of women--would be enormous. Absolute numbers matter. It's much more difficult for China to deal with this problem than for any other country, because of the sheer size of the problem.

A gender imbalance is NORMAL. The United States has surplus of 1.3 million men age 0-14. It's not really a problem because men die young or single all the time. https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

  USA Age structure:    
  0-14 years: 20.2% (male 31,639,127/female 30,305,704)
  15-64 years: 67% (male 102,665,043/female 103,129,321)
  65 years and over: 12.8% (male 16,901,232/female 22,571,696) (2009 est.) 
  Sex ratio:    
  *at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female*
  under 15 years: 1.04 male(s)/female
  15-64 years: 1 male(s)/female
  65 years and over: 0.75 male(s)/female
  total population: 0.97 male(s)/female (2009 est.)

  China Age structure:    
  0-14 years: 19.8% (male 140,877,745/female 124,290,090)
  15-64 years: 72.1% (male 495,724,889/female 469,182,087)
  65 years and over: 8.1% (male 51,774,115/female 56,764,042) (2009 est.) 
  Sex ratio:    
  *at birth: 1.1 male(s)/female*
  under 15 years: 1.13 male(s)/female
  15-64 years: 1.06 male(s)/female
  65 years and over: 0.91 male(s)/female
  total population: 1.06 male(s)/female (2009 est.)

  India:
  Age structure:    
  0-14 years: 31.1% (male 190,075,426/female 172,799,553)
  15-64 years: 63.6% (male 381,446,079/female 359,802,209)
  65 years and over: 5.3% (male 29,364,920/female 32,591,030) (2009 est.) 
  Sex ratio:    
  *at birth: 1.12 male(s)/female*
  under 15 years: 1.1 male(s)/female
  15-64 years: 1.06 male(s)/female
  65 years and over: 0.9 male(s)/female
  total population: 1.06 male(s)/female (2009 est.)

China's surplus might be 50% larger than normal, but it's still less than india and not all that far from normal.

I'm thinking another option is that the excess males might just leave for other countries. It seems like the most rational approach when an area doesn't provide the resources you need.

How many poor, rural, Chinese men have that option?

It will be the poorest Chinese who go without mates. They are the most violent and the most dangerous, and no country is capable or willing to support the immigration of literally millions of childless and aggressive poor men.

The Chinese leadership really only have two potentially effective options in my view. Try to manage it through pacification campaigns (estrogen in the water?) or send them abroad to die in wars.

> no country is capable or willing to support the immigration of literally millions of childless and aggressive poor men

The UK begs to differ.

Is there ANY country in the world that is interested in allowing in millions of single, male Chinese peasants? Which country is that?

The UAE, at least until recently.

I've not read that the United Arab Emirates policy on guest workers included encouraging them to settle permanently and marry local women.

Africa.

Africa is a continent that includes quite a few different countries. Are any of those countries actively seeking permanent settlement by Chinese citizens?

Whether or not they are seeking or not, they are getting it.

20% of Angola's population is Chinese.

Also note that there are countries (although without such a Chinese influence) who will have major demographic shortages. A good example is Botswana which has an HIV/AIDS prevalence rate of 38%.

20% of Angola's population is Chinese.

Do you have a citation of a source that says this? I just tried the usual kind of online sources for national population statistics for Angola, but I haven't found confirmation of this interesting statement.

Indeed, Wikipedia and the CIA do not have data that corroborate that statement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Angola#Ethnic_g...

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

The above 20% is probably wrong.

Just note that the citations from the CIA world factbook is probably worthless. In the official demographics of South Africa for example, neither illegal immigration or temporary migration is noted.

This is fairly high though (as much as 3 million Zimbabweans and many people form other African countries such as Somalia).

I read this in a South African newspaper. But in fairness, without a citation this is worthless.

I see posts claiming a 100,000 works in the formal sector (i.e. working for formal companies). The number of Chinese working in the informal sector or illegally would be unknown.

But the 20% figure is most probably wrong.

I'm surprised by the lack of common sense on this topic. (1) China doesn't just exports goods. It is a leading (if not the leading ) exporter of people http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Chinese (2) Extrapolating birth ratios stats into "unmarriagable men" doesn't work if you ignore the large difference in marriage rates due culture. Mainland Chinese has a relatively simple old school culture. People marry earlier than in the US and therefore "utilitize" their women at higher rates in the US and have lower divorce rates. I know an surprising number of decent guys in the US in their 40s of all sorts of ethnic backgrounds (white, latino, jewish, asian etc) that never married - sometimes never had a girlfriend. I know an equal number of women in US that have never married into their 40s and dont' look to marry soon. American culture simply does not PUSH as hard as Chinese culture to get married therefore the real gap is not as big as one might assume

But war is fast going robotic? OTOH, China, the world's factory, can certainly make lots of robots. :-) :-(

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